Wild Beasts (Franco Prosperi, 1983)
"Lions and tigers and bears! Oh my!"
This is a strange beast to say the least! It is a rather cheesy Italian horror film that comes extremely late on in the 'nature runs amok' subgenre that was big in the 1970s, yet also anticipates certain aspects of Jurassic Park a decade later! And probably the best recent comparison would be to that Hungarian film
White God, though White God 'limits' itself to just one species going crazy, while Wild Beasts has a whole menagerie! But I cannot think of any other films that involve an entire zoo of animals being driven crazy by PCP-polluted drinking water and going off on perhaps the wildest night of hijinks that there ever has been!
It was directed by one half of the filmmaking team behind some of the most eye-popping and morally difficult mondo films ever made (Mondo Cane, Africa Addio and Goodbye Uncle Tom), films which fuse real life atrocity footage (usually involving animals but in Africa Addio civil war footage and Goodbye Uncle Tom recreations of the height of slavery filmed with the co-operation of Papa Doc's regime in Haiti!) with rather moralising voiceovers ablout the state of the world today. Despite being entirely fictional Wild Beasts still kind of fits into this tradition!
We start off with a couple of title cards, one situating us in a "north european city" which from all of the signage around the place is in Germany (though from the extras apparently lots of scenes were filmed in Rome, and a couple in South Africa!), and the other giving us a moral quotation that basically spoils the final twist of the film from the very opening
(in the way that it equates animals and children together)
and then moves into its opening sequence showing lots of shots of polluted water flowing into a sewage treatment plant and quite classy shots of a nighttime cityscape over which some
cool jazz plays! This is really where the moralising aspect gets hilarious as we're obviously meant to see that it is all man's fault for the pollution in their drinking water that drives all of the innocent animals wild, but the film rather over-eggs this aspect, especially in the shot going down the escalator into the subway where on the side rail there are about a dozen used syringes just stuck haphazardly into some Play Dough, like some sort of abstract scuplture piece! Its all fantastically
Chris Morris-anticipating, because I'm sure that we've all seen discarded syringes lying around the place, usually in groups of ten to fifteen! These darn kids today and their new fangled drug habits! (That even crops up again in Prosperi's interview on the disc, where he mentions the slightly implausible statistic that 80% of children in Italy 12 years old or over have used Cocaine!)
Anyway
somehow, whether by organisational oversight or simply roaming gangs of careless street drug users, the city's drinking water becomes contaminated with PCP (making this film a bit in the tradition of George A. Romero's The Crazies), and we get lots of ominous close up shots of animals drinking, gardeners merrily spraying the flowerbeds with their hoses and so on, all shot with wonderfully overdubbed slurping sounds and an ominously building chord on the soundtrack! Especially when the blind man (who has wandered in from Suspiria or The Beyond) does not notice that their seeing eye dog has started drinking from a puddle! (Uh oh!)
There are a couple of shots here that start to betray the filmmaker's mondo film origins, perhaps most obviously the without warning one of the shot of meat being cut up for the big cats to eat, including a decapitated horse's head on a chopping block getting cut in two down the middle with a meat cleaver. Its not quite at the stage of showing real death on camera at the moment that it occurs, but we're still getting a bit of an insight into the bloody business of keeping carnivores fed (and kind of anticipates that early slaughterhouse sequence in White God).
Then we get a bit more set up of our various principle characters. There's the uber-masculine zoo keeper (anticipating a Steve Irwin or Timothy Treadway-type) complete with porn star moustache and open collared shirt to reveal a bit of bare chest hero, whose principle method of interacting with the animals appears to be getting close enough to give them a playful punch! Even the owl gets interfered with! No wonder they go crazy! (But I think this is all to do with someone continually telling the actor to 'interact' with the animals a little! The polar bear at the end
almost gets him with a playful swipe, and probably could have if its heart was in it!). He gets introduced entering a lion's cage and injecting the animal with a sedative up close rather than using a tranquiliser dart as this 'scares them'.
Then we have our heroine played by Lorraine de Selle (the lead, and only survivor, of ultra-nasty Cannibal Ferox a few years earlier) who has some sort of role at the zoo. Maybe managerial, maybe a photographer, I'm not entirely certain. But she's the only character in a vibrant red dress throughout the whole film, which is perhaps her most defining characteristic and nicely sets her apart from every other character! Though I bet she was grateful that there were no bulls in the zoo!
There's also a vague bit of business at the opening of these two characters talking together about children and their mothers, and matricide (because the animal who had to be sedated has had its nipples bitten by its cub). That, and the way that it seems that all of the animals are referred to by the zookeeper as females, is an interesting undercurrent going on (and anticipates Jurassic Park again!), although its all rather undeveloped beyond this one scene of early odd couple banter between our couple. It also works as a kind of premonition of the final twist, though this theme might need to have been a bit stronger to really have resonated as a key theme of the film. So many animal antics have gone on between the early scene and the final one that it is a little hard to remember that gender politics and matricide was even in the thematic mix!
And then there is the heroine's pre-teen daughter, neglected by her workaholic mother and having to arrange her own transport to her after school ballet class.
The most harrowing ballet class of her life!!
Now that we have gotten this in-depth characterisation out of the way, and made the audience aware that, anticipating Jurassic Park, for some reason all of the doors of the zoo cages are controlled by one high tech laser button that will open every cage immediately once the zoo's supercomputer with banks of flashing lights explodes (there's something hilarious about all the technology here, as well as in the 'disaster control centre' later on, where people are busily drawing lines on maps, pressing banks of complicated buttons and trying their best to ignore the warning beacons distractingly blinking away in their field of vision! There's also a
fantastic top-down shot of a table full of about fifty rotatry telephones with people holding bundles of receivers and shouting instructions into them! Is it Westworld-style satire on our hubristic reliance on technology or just overdone set design to the point of ridiculous abstraction? Can it be both?), we can get to what we have all come to this film looking for - scenes of animals running wild through the streets of a major city!
It is difficult to say that the audience doesn't get what they might have expected from this film! (This is the film to watch if you were less concerned by the whole allegorical aspect and just wanted more dog carnage from White God!). Events start relatively slowly and intimately with a couple of canoodling lovers in a parked car getting engulfed by a squeaking tidal wave of rats (making this immediately a better adaptation of James Herbert's The Rats than Deadly Eyes was! In fact I'd go as far to say that Wild Beasts is kind of the best film made in the vein of a James Herbert book, as it kind of has that same sense of disconnected set piece scenes of action-horror carnage, as well as an underpinning nihilistic environmental apocalypse sense, especially in its final twist that kind of feels similar to one of the major set pieces of The Fog), and then the blind man having a reckoning back in his apartment with his seeing-eye dog companion (Suspiria and The Beyond have this kind of 'betrayal of trust' scene happen too, so apparently this must have been a big concern in Italy at the time!). I quite like the way that the blind man's death is set up, with him playing music through his headphones so that he cannot hear, as well as see, the dog barking and snarling at him, and then when he notices and takes his headphones off to wrestle and get eaten by his companion the score comes up to overwhelm the screams with a kind of beautiful counterpointing melody.
The aftermath of the canoodling couple scene has the other rather morally dubious moment in it, as when spraying the rat covered car with water cannons doesn't work (it only makes it worse because they're spraying the animals down with more PCP-laced water!), apparently "fire is the only solution" and we get an, unfaked, sequence of rats getting flamethrowered to death. Except for one, which gets stamped on. I suppose for an Italian horror film of this era to only really have this amount of real animal violence in it is an achievement of some sort! (There is an amazing later scene where the big cats and hyenas invade a slaughterhouse and start wrestling the pigs and cattle to the ground as they would when hunting in the wild, but according to the slightly dubious interviews on the disc as soon as the scene was finished the animals parted company on good terms! :-k )
Anyway I'll try not to go into too much detail on the rest of the action, but events just keep snowballing and taking place on an ever widening scale throughout the rest of the film. This is really a must see film for anyone who may want the following questions answered:
- How long would it take a tiger to eat its way through a subway car full of passengers? (About ten seconds. Twenty when played out in slow motion)
- Does someone being menaced through their unwisely open car window (seriously, a lot of these deaths, like the rat one, could have been avoided by keeping the windows rolled up) and then strangled to death by an elephant's trunk look implausible and ridiculous? (Yes it does)
- Can a human head withstand the pressure from an elephant's foot stepping on it? (No, not by a long way)
- What is a police inspector's foodstuff of choice (not doughnuts, but cheese puffs apparently!)
- Who would win in a race between a woman in an open topped Volkswagen Beetle with a flat tyre and a cheetah running at full speed? (The car, just. And until it crashes in a big fireball, so the cheetah wins by default in having more control and co-ordination of its movements)
- In a game of chicken between a herd of elephants and a passenger plane coming into land on a runway, who will blink first? (The passenger plane will. And in a continuing trend of the humans causing more widescale damage than the animals
of course the passenger plane has to barrel straight into the power station unwisely situated at the end of the runway, the subsequent explosion blacking out the city)
- Who will win in a showdown between a group of pre-teen schoolchildren and a polar bear, both groups hopped up to the nines on PCP? (Everyone will win, except for the teachers trying to maintain some sense of order to the situation)
- Why does every employee working in a zoo (including the janitor) have a working knowledge of what PCP is and its street name of "Angel Dust" to be able to describe what it does to the heroine?
And then everything takes a swerve into a "won't somebody
please think of the children?!?!?" area that is both an interesting left field climax that takes the film into territory of something like Who Can Kill A Child?, and rather glibly suggests that animals and children exist on about the same sub-adult human unsocialised developmental level!
I just have a few nit-picky issues with the film. Its quite impressive and hilarious at times, but one problem really is that there isn't too much of a pay-off to the action beyond putting the animals into such bizarre situations. The main pleasure to be found here comes from the juxtaposition of say seeing a stampede of cattle through an outdoor cafe or a polar bear wandering down the corridor of a school, not from any particular narrative resolution to that situation.
And why no birds involved in the action? (apart from the owl, who looks like it just wants to be left alone and not get touched!) There are a couple of shots of an owl, and some stuffed birds in the blind man's apartment, but other than that they don't feature much. Perhaps birds going wild is a bit too complex to be pulled off as easily without special effects. Also how can you show an Esso petrol station in the (great) sequence of the cheetah wandering the neon lit streets of the city and not have a "put a tiger in your tank" allusion! They don't miss the ballet class doing a "dying swan" pun ("how about a dead duck?") later on!
Watch together with Peter Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts for an unforgettable insight into the working practices and state of mid-1980s European zoos! (And for an actual Esso reference!)
